The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on Monday reported that exposure to radioactive materials near St. Louis, Mo., could be linked to a heightened danger of various types of cancer.
Coldwater Creek was contaminated by upstream storage facilities for radiological waste from uranium extraction operations in St. Louis for the World War II Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. These sites are now being cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP)
Local residents in 2016 asked the ATSDR and St. Louis County Department of Public Health to study the potential connection between the waste contamination and health problems experienced in the area. In a draft report issued Monday, the Health and Human Services agency said it determined that locals who lived or played near the creek over a period of years from the 1960s to 1990s could face a higher potential for bone or lung cancer, leukemia, and to a lesser degree skin or breast cancer. Heightened danger for bone or lung cancer persists from daily exposure for those who lived near the creek beginning in the 2000s.
However, the agency is not recommending further general disease evaluations for past or current residents near the creek. “The predicted increases in the number of cancer cases from exposures are small, and no method exists to link a particular cancer with this exposure,” according to the draft report.
Some present and prior residents would have had lower exposures than the level assumed by the ATSDR study, the agency said. It added that it backs continued work to find and clean radiological waste in the area, but there is no means for studying other potential routes of exposure such as inhalation of dust from waste storage piles.
Public input or additional data from environmental sampling could change the findings, the federal agency said.
